Bad News,” an Esquire profile of Alden Whitman, the Times reporter who filed obituaries in an era when the job was seen as, well, a dead end and certainly bereft of glory writers got no bylines and were expected to stick to the formula. The true picture of a Times obituary writer came first in 1966 via Gay Talese (a detail that will likely one day appear in his own New York Times obituary) with “ Mr. The prevailing myth of the Times obit is that an advance obituary exists for almost every notable public figure, to be plucked out of a file, affixed with an update, and fed into the paper. But the level of interest and devotion to detail from a fellow storyteller stuck with her. She was impressed by the questions the reporter Margalit Fox asked her, many of which she didn’t have the answers to- details about Joisel’s early life before she’d met him, contradictory reports about a possible early marriage, for instance. After this hard, impoverished life he’d led, the acclaim he’d never reach in life, now he’d have in death,” Gould said recently by phone from New York City, where her new film, Obit, opens today. “I was amazed that The New York Times was interested in the life of an unknown French paper artist.
He had lived in relative obscurity, and had it not been for a phone call from the most highly regarded of those papers, he would have died in obscurity too.
Six years ago, filmmaker Vanessa Gould wrote to a half-dozen newspapers around the world with the news that Eric Joisel, the origami artist who was the subject of her first documentary, Between the Folds, had died at the age of 53.
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